Jason's Gold

by Will Hobbs

  All around the cabin the snow was gone, and the early flowers were blooming. But the Yukon River was still in the grip of the ice, even though the sun was high in the sky and streaming sunshine nearly around the clock.

  When the last week of May arrived, Jason and Charlie knew the ice would have to yield soon, and within a few days it did. It began to groan, and to crack, and to move, but just as quickly it seized up again and there was no sound or movement at all.

  A few days later, when it moved again, blocks of ice weighing countless tons ground against one another and jostled for position—and went nowhere. They locked together downstream from the cabin and formed an immense dam. A temporary lake was forming in front of their eyes as the river level rose and floated the field of shards higher and higher up the banks.

  They shook their heads and looked at each other. “Are we safe where we stand?” Charlie asked.

  “You’d think so,” Jason answered. “This cabin has been here for years.”

  A few minutes later, the ice was rising above the Yukon’s bank.

  “I’m not so sure,” Jason said. “We better move our things, and fast.”

  They dragged the canoe to higher ground first, then rushed into the cabin and packed their gear into packsacks and flour sacks, and hustled it up the low ridge above the cabin. All the while the ice was rising higher and higher, beginning to crush the bushy alders along the bank. They barely had time to save the last of the bear meat.

  Then came a sound like a thunderclap and, moments later, the entire river of ice was on the move again. “The dam broke!” Charlie yelled.

  From the knoll above the cabin, they saw the chaos of ice resume its inexorable march downriver, shearing and grinding and making a thunder. Berglike pieces larger than the cabin went tumbling by. Along both banks of the river, tall cottonwood trees were snapping off like matchsticks.

  The dam must have solidified again, because the ice once more came to a standstill, and the temporary lake began to rise again. The ice floated higher and higher, until the river was lapping at the door of the cabin and they thought it surely couldn’t rise any more.

  It rose, relentlessly, until only the roof of the cabin was showing amid a surging sea of ice. The cache appeared to have no legs under it.

  When the dam broke the second time, it sounded like the end of the world. They watched the ice go out finally in a catastrophic surge, taking the cabin and the cache and hundreds of trees with it.

  Jason had his eye on a five-foot piece of log, neatly sawed at both ends, that had lain behind the cabin since the first week of January. The log was bobbing down the Yukon now, holding its own with the ice on the beginning of a long journey. Jason pointed to it, remaining silent. Seeing where he pointed, Charlie nodded, recognizing the log. “There he goes,” Charlie said solemnly.

  Both were streaming tears. Jason was remembering how they’d tried to dig a grave in the frozen earth and failed. Yet they couldn’t bear to burn King’s body or to leave him out in the open where he’d be exposed to scavengers. They’d sawed a five-foot length from a downed cottonwood and split it down the middle. With the hatchet and the ax, each of them had chipped a hollow in his half of the log, as if they were making two miniature dugout canoes. When they were done, they pieced the halves back together with the husky’s body inside, then bound King’s coffin securely with rope, around and around.

  They were about to lose sight of the log downstream. “The King of the North,” Jason whispered, “that’s what you were. Good-bye, King—I’ll never forget you. I hope you make it all the way to the Pacific Ocean.”

  The next day, the last day of May, they decided it was safe to load the canoe and start downriver. Charlie boarded, nimble as a cat, and stowed his crutches. With a glance back at where the cabin had stood, Jason got in the stern and pushed off. He couldn’t help shouting, “Klondike or bust!”

  If his brothers were down at Dawson, it couldn’t possibly turn out a bust. It had taken him nearly a year and over five thousand miles to understand the relative value of gold. He wouldn’t trade his brothers—Charlie either—for the wealth of George Washington Carmack.

  Still, he couldn’t help wondering if there had been fabulous new discoveries made since last fall. If so, he’d be among the first to stake.

  “Let’s paddle,” he said. “Who knows how many are on our heels.”

  Their canoe shot downstream like an arrow.

  Upriver, thirty thousand stampeders were expecting breakup at any moment. They’d been champing at the bit all May.

  Time was of the essence, and they were primed for a five-hundred-mile race.

  On May 29, the ice began to go out on the lower lakes, Laberge, Marsh, and Tagish. Eight hundred boats hoisted crude canvas sails and men pulled on the oars until they thought their backs would break.

  On May 31, the ice went out from Lake Bennett and the One Mile River and Lake Lindeman, and now the entire armada—7,124 boats of every description—was on the move at last. The Mounties estimated that the cargo included thirty million pounds of solid food.

  Down the lakes came the most bizarre flotilla ever assembled, from dugout canoes to Huck Finn rafts, catamarans, innumerable skiffs of twenty to twenty-five feet, scows as heavy as twenty tons floating horses and oxen, even a small steamboat that a man and his wife had packed piece by piece over the Chilkoot and reassembled.

  When the winds died out, sometimes everyone stopped rowing, and the race was suspended without a word spoken. Someone with a deep, booming voice would begin to sing a song of home, Virginia or Scotland or even Australia. As the song carried across the lake, all eyes lifted from the mirror-calm surface spangled with sails to the snow-clad peaks and the azure skies above. Men and women wept at the beauty, at the thought of the hardships they had endured and the loved ones they had left back home.

  They knew they were a part of something grand. Mad, but grand.

  As the flotilla approached Miles Canyon, a bottleneck of Olympian proportions developed. Word came back that one hundred and fifty boats had wrecked in the preceding forty-eight hours, and five men had drowned. Some had attempted the canyon and rapids below without even scouting them from the shore, they were in such a hurry.

  At the foot of the White Horse Rapids, some were in despair, while others scurried to salvage what they could of their boats and belongings. Jacob Jackson of Des Moines, Iowa, who’d toted hundreds of pounds of seed over the Chilkoot, saw his dream die when his boat swamped in the White Horse. He had come north not to find gold but to grow hardy vegetables and sell them to the stampeders.

  Some of the boats waiting above Miles Canyon contained commodities, luxuries, even perishables freshly packed over the passes to be sold at the highest possible prices in Dawson City. Thirty or more boats were carrying eggs by the crate; one had a crate of live chickens. One was loaded with tinned milk, one had a milk cow, one was carrying dozens of cats and kittens, and one had newspapers only a month old that told of war with Spain. An Italian fruit merchant was transporting sixteen thousand pounds of cucumbers, bananas, oranges, lemons, and candy.

  Colonel Sam Steele of the Mounted Police, who’d rushed down from Tagish Lake after envisioning the bottleneck, learned of the drownings and immediately stopped all traffic at the entrance of the canyon. Unless order could be quickly established here, the river could take a far greater toll than the seventy lives the Palm Sunday avalanche had exacted on the Alaska side of the Chilkoot.

  A giant of a man in scarlet jacket and yellow-striped trousers, the superintendent spoke to the throng huddled at the entrance of the canyon: “There are many of you who have said that the Mounted Police make the laws as they go along, and I am going to do so now, for your own good. Therefore, the directions that I give shall be carried out strictly. No boat will be permitted to go through the canyon until the corporal is satisfied that it has sufficient freeboard to enable it to ride the waves in safety. No boat will be allowed to pass with human beings in it
unless it is steered by competent men, and of that the corporal will be the judge.”

  As everyone knew, Steele’s fine of a hundred dollars for anyone breaking the rules would be enforced.

  Steele’s regulations worked. Many decided to portage their outfits, but many others ran the canyon and the rapids, almost always successfully.

  In the first half of June it was nearly impossible, from Bennett to Dawson City, to be out of sight of other boats. Suddenly it was hot, as hot as ninety degrees, and mosquitoes hatched in the moss of the forest floor by the untold billions. Frank Cushing of Buffalo, New York, tried some of the mosquito repellent he’d packed over the pass—ten thousand bottles, which he planned to sell for ten dollars apiece. The lotion raised such horrible blisters on his skin that he threw the entire shipment into the Yukon.

  The mosquitoes descended on the stampeders with a vengeance. For some Klondikers, this was the last straw. Tensions that had simmered through the endless winter suddenly erupted as the men were on the verge of reaching their destination. At the mouth of the Big Salmon River, ten partners divided everything they had onto ten blankets, sawed their scow into ten pieces, and reconstructed ten individual boats.

  Of the thirty thousand floating toward Dawson, only several hundred arrived before Jason Hawthorn and Charlie Maguire. Most of these had spent the winter sixty miles upstream of Dawson City, at the mouth of the Stewart, which had become known as Split-Up City for all the partnerships that had come to grief there.

  As Jason and Charlie paddled those last miles above Dawson, there wasn’t a boat in sight, upriver or downriver. They had passed the mouth of the White River the day before, and they knew they were close. At last the canoe rounded a rocky bluff and there it was, underneath a dome-shaped mountain with a landslide scar: a gleaming miniature metropolis in the wilderness, a city of white tents and frame houses, hotels and warehouses, just beyond a fast-running clear stream entering from the right—the Klondike.

  “Great day in the morning,” Jason declared. “It’s the Golden City! We made it! Now, where are my brothers?”

  Charlie was pointing to the lettering across the back of one of the warehouses. It read HAWTHORN BROTHERS SAWMILL.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jason cleared his throat and spoke up. “I’m looking for a job.”

  The baldheaded clerk in the tent office at the sawmill’s entrance peered over the rims of his eye-glasses. “We need men, but the owners expect me to hire experienced hands sixteen years and older.”

  “I turned sixteen this spring.”

  “All right, I’ll grant you that, but have you ever worked in a sawmill before?”

  “No, but I always wanted to. Back in Seattle it was the same thing—you had to be sixteen, and I wasn’t old enough yet. I heard the owners are from Seattle. Are their names Abe and Ethan?”

  “Abraham and Ethan, yes.”

  Jason’s heart leapt. It wasn’t a mistake. The sawmill didn’t belong to some other Hawthorn brothers.

  Trying not to spoil his own fun, Jason didn’t allow himself the merest grin. “I knew them in Seattle. I’d be much obliged if you’d ask them if they’d give me a job—they won’t regret it. You could tell them that my father worked in a sawmill, and my brothers too. It runs in my family. Tell them I also have a lot of cannery experience. I’m a good worker.”

  “You seem pretty determined.”

  “Oh, I am. Would you mind telling them all those things, and tell them I’m waiting out here, hoping to hear about the job?”

  The clerk seemed slightly amused. “I will,” he said. “I’ll find one or the other, and tell him everything you said.”

  The minutes dragged like hours as they waited.

  “Tink-eye,” Charlie said when he couldn’t stand the tension any longer.

  “Tink-eye who?”

  “Tink I gonna pop.”

  Just then, around the side of a mountain of logs, here they came—Ethan with his full beard and burly logger’s physique, and straight-as-a-pine Abe, trailing with his slight limp.

  “Jason!” they cried, eyes enormous with astonishment. They slapped him on the back as Charlie hopped to the side on his crutches.

  “We sent your passage in a letter, only a few days ago!” Ethan exclaimed. “On the first boat out, care of Mrs. Beal. How in the world did you get here?”

  With a grin, Jason replied, “Very gradually. I left Seattle only three days after you did.”

  For a moment neither of his brothers could speak. He was sure Ethan would make some joking remark, but both were dumbfounded. They stared at him, then at Charlie.

  “What happened?” Abraham asked finally. “Tell us everything.”

  “My friend Charlie and I…we both ran into a few difficulties….”

  Their eyes went to Charlie’s leg, then back to Jason’s weather-beaten face.

  “We’re sourdoughs,” Charlie put in proudly. “We wintered at Five Fingers. Your brother saved my life.”

  They kept nodding all the while, Abe worrying his mustache, Ethan beaming. They were still looking Jason up and down, still shaking their heads. “You’ve grown like a kelp weed,” Ethan marveled.

  Abe said in measured tones, “It’s been a long time since you left home, Jason. You’re practically a grown man, and you favor Father.”

  “Am I ever glad to see you two,” Jason said softly, giving way to tears he could no longer hold back.

  Now his brothers were surprised all over again. They’d never seen him cry.

  At midnight, in the log cabin his brothers had built on a high back street, the June sunset was still blazing and his brothers were still asking about the Chilkoot and the winter. At last Jason was able to steer them back to the present. He said, “I still can’t believe I’m part owner in the Hawthorn Brothers Sawmill.”

  “And rightly so,” Abe replied in his sober manner. “You helped stake us. We three Hawthorn brothers own a fifty-one percent interest in this sawmill.”

  With his tongue in his cheek, Jason looked from one to the other and asked, “How did we accomplish that?”

  “The two of us who got here first,” Ethan began in the same vein, “thought we were going to strike it rich within a matter of days. We hotfooted it out of town and found some ground to stake, but, as you can see, you aren’t looking at two of the kings of Eldorado.”

  “We starved out fast,” Abe continued. “Several thousand men had had a year to prospect the entire country before we got here. The worthwhile ground had already been staked.”

  “So we found jobs at a sawmill,” Ethan said. “It was what we knew how to do.”

  Abe leaned forward in his chair. “The owner of the mill was a man named Joseph Ladue. He owned all the ground under Dawson City. He’d filed on it within days of Carmack’s discovery and has been selling off parcels of land for houses and businesses all this time. He wanted to start more sawmills, and he liked our work, so he staked us on this one.”

  “Ladue didn’t want the trouble of managing it,” Ethan put in excitedly, “so he made us the majority owners. That way he could be sure we’d make a go of it.”

  “Is the gold still coming in from the creeks?” Jason asked. “Will all this building keep going?”

  Ethan burst into a hearty laugh, his impish green eyes shining. “There’s no end in sight! Fabulous amounts of gold are coming out of the creeks every day. Just Wednesday, a man shoveled twenty thousand dollars out of his claim in twelve hours.”

  “Can we go see the diggings? Charlie and I want to see Bonanza Creek and Eldorado Creek.”

  “Sure—let’s all take a wagon ride out there in the morning.”

  “What about the sawmill?” Jason objected. “Don’t shut down work for my sake.”

  Abe raised a wry eyebrow. “The lately arrived partner doesn’t want to see a production slowdown….”

  Ethan laughed, then explained, “Tomorrow’s Sunday. The mill is inside the city limits, and Dawson has blue laws—everything c
loses up.” Ethan pulled out his watch from his vest pocket, opened it up. “I should have said, Today is Sunday—it’s six minutes past midnight. Six minutes ago, the opera house and the saloons, every business in town closed its doors. The Mounties are strict. Last week a man was fined for mending his fishing net on the Lord’s day.”

  As the lumber wagon clattered across the bridge over the Klondike, Abe let the horses crop at the grass. Then he started the team up the Bonanza Creek Road. Jason was expecting a landscape to match his glorious image of the fabled gold creeks, but what came into view was a scene of utter devastation. A battlefield that had undergone a year’s shelling couldn’t have looked bleaker.

  As far as the eye could see, the hills had been stripped to the ground, looking all the more naked for the occasional tree sticking up along the ridges. Cabins and tents and lean-tos, privies and caches were scattered randomly among immense mounds of dirt and gravel, as if they’d been dropped by a cyclone.

  Along the valley floor, not a vestige of greenery remained. A creek splashed its way through ditches and diversions, among heaps and heaps of bare gravel and much more machinery than seemed likely here at the ends of the earth: rockers and boilers, steam engines, winches, pumps, and hoses.

  Here was the greatest human anthill in the North. On all sides men were toiling with insectlike industriousness. Some were winching buckets of ore from vertical shafts that riddled the area, while others shoveled dirt and gravel into the sluice boxes—rickety knee-high wooden chutes running with diverted streamlets.

  “Here it is,” his brother Ethan announced grandly. “The richest placer in the world. What do you think, now that you’re here?”

  Jason grinned, shook his head. “I’m remembering a newspaper article I read during the first week of the rush. It was about a new company called the Trans Alaskan Gopher Company. They were offering stock at a dollar a share and said they were projecting to make ten dollars a minute. The idea was that the gophers were going to dig up the gold.”